Contents

Situation

You have a system with a "simple" RAID controller on the system board or an expansion card. You'd like to use the disks individually or in a different system.

If you just remove the disks and attach them to a different controller, the metadata associated with the old RAID arrays will be read by the DMRAID subsystem and the RAID array will be reassembled automatically. If you still have the RAID controller hardware, you can use it to release the disks. If you don't have the RAID controller hardware, or would just prefer not to reboot in order to use the disks, this article is for you.

Procedure

This article describes several solutions:

with YaST2

[Someone with experience doing this with YaST, please expand.]

on the command line

The easiest way to clean up the old RAID disks is by using the dmraid command. This command is the direct way to interact with dmraid devices. It can create, activate, and destroy software RAID arrays using the formats specific to simple RAID controller hardware. If all you're looking to do is release the disks, skip to the "deactivation" step and go from there.

To list the formats that dmraid will claim as its own, use the dmraid -l command:

Using the dmraid -r command, it's possible to list which devices are currently claimed for dmraid's RAID arrays. As an example, here are a pair of 60 GB disks configured as a RAID1 array for an Intel controller.

Now that the array is created, it only exists in on-disk metadata. If you were to reboot right now, the array will be activated when the system returns. To activate it manually, use the dmraid -a y command with the raid set name.

~ # dmraid -a y isw_dbhjdbjhca_test
RAID set "isw_dbhjdbjhca_test" was activated
device "isw_dbhjdbjhca_test" is now registered with dmeventd for monitoring